Sun Microsystems is setting out to conquer the European small and medium sized enterprise (SME) market with the launch of a complete set of products aimed at giving enterprise-class systems to mid-sized companies.

The company has struck deals with Microsoft, Intel and AMD to deliver mid-market servers, storage, software, services and support systems.

Customers will be able to choose from a range of products and platforms including Sun Fire x64 and UltraSPARC-processor based servers and storage, a range of operating systems, including Solaris 10, Windows and Linux, as well as several databases including Sun's MySQL.

"The mid-market enterprise segment in Europe represents a major revenue growth opportunity," said Alain Andreoli, president of Sun in Europe.

"Sun is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this growth segment by maximising our extensive partner network to deliver our innovative, open source software solutions, combined with our enterprise-class highly-reliable x86 and storage product line.

Andreoli reckons this combination will help mid-market enterprises to reduce overall IT costs while increasing productivity, and ultimately grow the businesses to become a fully fledged enterprise Sun customer.

The launch builds on the company's existing SME initiatives, including Sun Startup Essentials which helps eligible early stage companies accelerate their development cycle by allowing them to purchase discounted Sun products and hosting services, and its Try and Buy programmes, designed to let businesses test Sun products in their own IT environments before buying anything.

To jumpstart the new initiative, Sun has launched 13 web portals across Europe to help promote its mid-market platforms and give visitors the chance to sign up for free trials and special promotions.

Sun has also launched a new on-site data erasure service to help customers remain compliant with internal corporate data erasure policies during the removal, redeployment or relocation of equipment containing sensitive data.

By erasing data at the platter level, the service also promises an auditable system allowing customers to prove compliance with the ever increasing policies of regulatory agencies for the removal or destruction of data.